The Idea: I want to make a compilation of the best tips for marketers running an affiliate program and I'm going to need your input! (Work Title: How To Get Your Affiliates To Promote Your Products More Actively?) What I'm looking for are useful answers to the above question. No full length articles, simply some (practical) tips that can be used by other marketers to give their affiliate program a boost. What's in it for you? The most useful tips will be bundled in a report/ebook. If your tip makes it, your name and link will be published with it. Once the report/ebook is published, it'll start driving free targeted traffic to your site. If I feel it would be helpful to others to dig deeper into a certain tip, I might do an interview with the person that submitted that tip. Anyway - the report/ebook is the main goal, and I'll see where it goes from there. Let's just say your tips will bring you free targeted traffic. And isn't that what we're all looking for? Please post your tips/ideas here Greetz!
I don't do affiliate marketing, but as a writer on advertising and marketing, I can pass along to you what my readers have told me, along with my thoughts: 1. Don't do squeeze pages. The reason is obvious...it turns away a good many visitors. That's a no brainer anyway, but not many Webmasters have a brain. 2. Don't give vital sales info JUST to the ones who sign up with your newsletters. Put it on your site for EVERYONE to see. Again, that's a no brainer, but, again.... 3. Make sure your site looks nice, it has plenty of info, and it downloads fast. 4. Keep the prices low. 5. Answer e-mails. 6. Don't have looooooooooong landing pages. They are the worst.
Sorry if I misunderstood your question, but if I have affiliates I would give them bonuses for x number of sales.
my normal tips 1) dont used cheap parlor tricks lures, spam ect.. 2) if you aiming for teenagers, use what they like, if adults, then what they like.. basically for the target, you need the right kind of arrows 3) use incentives trust there are a lot of people out there that will do stuff for money lol
How about these: - performance bonuses (10 sales get something-something) - top affiliate contest (top affiliate gets $500 extra, ipod maybe) - prepare marketing materials (email copy, banners, etc) people with blogs/websites will simply put them up and you get continuous traffic - 2-tier?? sometimes when I find the right product, I like being able to recruit others and just sit back... - if you have good backend, then increase the commission... 100% maybe? - run an affiliate ezine reporting top affiliates, contest, strategies, etc... the idea is motivation - ok, do look for you affiliates. this can be webmasters/bloggers with high trafficked website, ezines with huge subscriber-base
Bonuses and prize contests are my favorite, and I see fewer of these now then ever. I used to promote software for a guy who held a monthly top affiliate contest. That program paid 50/50 revenue on every sale you sent, but at the end of every month the top selling affiliate got a 100% bonus, meaning he or she earned 100% for their sales that whole month. That may seem crazy to some publishers, who would want to part with all the profits of their best affiliate every month? But, it kept all of the affiliates hustling so in the long run I bet it was well worth it. Just my $0.02 worth, but the other thing I'd suggest is producers/publishers taking a more active role in working with affiliates. I've got over 70 affiliate web sites running right now for over 70 different products and yet have only had 6 email contacts so far this year from any of the publishers I'm pushing sales for. 6 out of 70 in two months. And that's not the whole picture because some of the publishers I've been promoting for over a year without ever getting a single email contact from them. How hard is an occasional email to your affiliates to ask "is there anything we can do to make it easier for you?", or even to say "hey, thanks for continuing to work with us"... Or worse yet, I've contacted 2 of the publishers I promote myself in the past month about promotional graphics and neither bothered to reply. Think I'm going to keep promoting their stuff? There's always someone else with an offer out there and as soon as I have time to update my sites they're out. I know it's easy for a publisher to think that since they created the product they understand the market, but that's really not the case most of the time. It's the folks making the sales who know the market and it amazes me that so many publishers don't expend much effort at all on tapping their affiliates for insights on how to improve their program for everyone's benefit.
Provide them with good marketing materials. And do contests every now and again for the top affiliates.
Thanks everyone Many people mention affiliate contests. But what do you give as a prize, taken you can/will not release (master) resale rights? Plain cash? Something else?
Affiliates need motivation Motivation can be in terms of money or recognition. Many members have touched on how to increase their participation with monetary rewards. I agree that is the most important pull factor to buy them over and work hard for your product. You can also use the push factor to get the inactive affiliates to start promoting for you as well. The following is some suggestions to do so: 1) Show them success stories. Show and inform all your affiliates how well your top affiliate have done. How much they have lose out by sitting there and waiting things to happen. Most affiliates will start to kick themselves once they know that they ARE people earning good commission from your products. 2) Help them to get the first sale. Based on my experience, the break through level is from zero to one. Most affiliates forget the idea of affiliate marketing once they do not see any sales coming in for a few months.. There are several ways you can achieve this. By pointing them to a successful technique, landing page example, send them free eBooks on affiliate marketing or even provide consultancy to their promoting technique (but effort intensive). Hope you find my suggestions helpful